Rhetorical Response 3

Unlike usual article about a person, this is not like a biography or a made-up story.
All we see in this profile are descriptions and details about a real person, who has her own theory, emotion and life experience.
Erykah Badu was a very famous pop star. It seems that people like this kind of celebrities are very far away from us because we might not know much about their world and their life. They are always shining on the stage, like real stars. People around them are always reporters, journalists and their numerous fans. We can often not consider them as normal people. Michal Hall’s article about Badu changed my idea about how to read a celebrity and how to write a profile about a person.


Hall seems more willing to give us an image of Badu which indicates that she is also a normal woman apart from a popular star. A normal girl, a normal mother, or we can even say she is just a normal artist. “The 35-year-old Badu asked Ysheka, one of her assistants, to bring a bottle, and when it came, the toddler climbed back into her mother’s lap and drank quietly.” This is image is just common life. Badu is just a normal mother when it comes to her baby. Hall gave us a lot of details about Badu. I think the reason why Hall can get so many details is that he made his first interview with Badu in Badu’s house. I think this action is well worth learning from. A person might be easy to be himself/herself when he/she is in his/her own house. Maybe it is Badu’s nature to be energetic on the stage. Maybe it is also Badu’s nature to be soft and gentle to her children when she is in her house. However, when we visit her in the house, the only one we can see is a lovely mother who takes real good care of her babies. This state can not be usually seen by the readers, so this becomes one of the attractions of this article.


We can see “she looked as if she’d just come from a morning cruising thrift shops, wearing a black shirt, white plaid pants, purple leggings, and an apron because she’d forgotten to put on a belt.” The details make the reader feel that they were there, seeing how Badu looked like and we can all sense that she acted just like our own mothers.

Let’s take another example, when her baby girl Puma came to her, look how she reacted.
“Puma had wandered off during our interview, but now she returned and crawled up into her mother’s lap, hugging her belly. She wasn’t fussy anymore, and Badu held her close. “I got you,” she said. “I got you.””
What a sweet scene. I believe anyone among us felt warm when reading this paragraph. The mother in her house, with her own baby was totally different from the singing star we saw on the stage. I think this is what Hall was trying to tell us through these details.


When we talk about details, there are always two key factors. One is actions and the other is people’s words. It does not have to be dialogue; it can be just one word or one sentence. We can know Badu is versatile woman because she told us. “I paint, draw, sew, design clothes, sculpt, build, and raise children.”
Nevertheless, what I paid more attention to is not about what she straightly told us but what someone else told us. When Badu and Hall were in the dancing school, Badu danced and her skill surprised everyone present. Rosann McLaughlin Cox, the founder of the school’s dance program, said to no one in particular:
“See her back there? She looks like one of the babies!”
Through this word you can totally understand how perfectly Badu did even we readers were not there. But we can still see, right?
That’s the charm of the details of people’s words. All the details make the people act out of paper. We can even understand them even without talking to them.


Hall likes to put some early life experience of Badu in his article between different paragraphs of different interviews. I think this is a method to make readers understand the cultural or social background of the early life of Badu. Let’s just take me, a normal reader as an example. For me, I am Chinese and I do not know much about the pop world of the U.S. So when I see the title I did not even know who Badu is. However, when I read the paragraph describing her early life, I can also understand because there were backgrounds there. I think this is how Hall connects Badu’s experience to the whole culture of America.

The second and the third interview of Badu came together, one was in the school and another was on the trip in a car. I think that would be a good idea. When I originally think about my own essay 3, which is the profile. I thought a lot about where I should make my interview. I can simply choose a Café like Starbucks every time but I do not want to. I think special place can make people think more different.